How to Position Your Brand?

Posted 26 March 2011 in Market Research

Introduction

The positioning of a brand will go a long way to ensuring that the brand is successful.  But how do we ensure that we identify the optimal positioning for a brand/product?  Most companies will utilize the assistance of a market research agency.  Over time market research agencies have developed a number of robust methods to determine the optimal positioning and re-positioning for a brand.

The objective of positioning research is to identify the optimal positioning for the brand/product/company etc and to provide actionable insights that enable the client to convince customers to connect the brand to the positioning.  An important point to note is that if a company does not position the brand, the market including your competitors, will do this for you and this may well not be where you wish your product to end up.

But what exactly is positioning.  Positioning is generally understood to mean - where the brand fits relative to the competition and as the place a product occupies in the mind of the target customer.  Positioning may appear to suggest a spatial metaphor, locating a brand or product within the market and this could imply that positioning is a rational function of the product's characteristics relative to those of the competition.

Rational Positioning

The concept of rational positioning is based on the specific differentiation of attributes of a brand/product etc.  The underlying assumption is that we choose the products or service that offers the best fit to our perceived needs and wants, relative to the competition.  A qualitative positioning process produces a positioning story for a client's product.  Depth interviews are used to put together the most compelling and differentiating positioning statement from the elements provided.  There are usually three parts to this process. 

The first step will be to identify the positioning headline or theme eg Philips, Ingenuity TF PET/CT "Ingenuity TF offers you exceptional image quality, extremely fast scans, and the ability to choose the right dose – without compromise".  The phrase or statement selected represents the insight that has been developed by understanding the needs of the customer.  The second step involves identifying the reasons to believe or key supports that make the positioning believable or compelling (eg TF utilizes full list mode capabilities, allowing for faster scans, up to 67% lower dose, and exceptional image quality).  These may be product features, a description of the active mechanism, underlying science or technology etc.  HCPs will often reject positioning statements that are not based on genuine support describing them as manipulative, disingenuous or marketing hype.  In the third step, the benefit or unique offering should be identified and it is important to understand the difference between features and benefits.  A feature is an attribute or characteristic of a product/service.  A benefit is what that means for the customer, end-user etc.  In other words the "So what?"  There are many features but what does that mean for me?  The critical factor is to link the behaviour to a benefit - to give them a reason why it's in their best interest to do so.  "Ingenuity TF allows you to choose the right scan for your patient without trading off quality or patient dose".  The benefit to you is it "allows you to choose the right scan for your patient".

Non-Rational Level (Emotional Positioning)

Unfortunately a large number of projects will be ended once the rational positioning has been completed.  The brand team will then produce advertising and other promotional aids using the rational positioning in the market.  But as we all know human beings are not always rationale.  We don't operate like computers and simply process data but we interact with the world using feelings and emotions in conjunction with rationale perspectives.  Brand, products and companies conjure up feelings (eg the banks are producing many negative emotions at the present time).  Iconic brands trigger feelings such as, the excitement people feel about iPads and the safe environment espoused by Volvo.  These feelings are not always due to the product itself - rational characteristics - but they are the result of how these products have been emotionally positioned.

There are two objectives for this type of emotional positioning:

a.   to persuade the market to associate the product with emotions that fit the overall brand strategy and

b.   to literally to make the brand feel more desirable, more like the ideal offering over the competitor product. 

Usually, market researchers will employ some form of projective technique(s) ranging from tried and tested personification methods (eg "What animal/object would best fit the product" or alternatively, the respondent could sort through a deck of images to choose the one that most feels like the product.  This is followed by probing as to why they made the choices they did which allows the researcher to gain insight into their underlying feelings.

In addition to the profiling examples above, market research can also build a positioning strategy for the product. Methods such as laddering, where one asks what is important about some aspect of an offering and then asks "Why do you say that?" and keeps drilling down to the underlying needs, fears and desires.  This will allow the researcher to understand the emotional associations that can make a product appear to fill the underlying emotional wishes of the customer.

A next step would be to use the projective methods and expand their focus to competitors and/or an optimum product.  Emotional profiling of the client product along with the competitor products, along with probing to understand the meaning of each to the respondent should determine where the client's product stands in relation to competitors and the optimum product, that most closely meets the unmet needs of respondents.  The researcher should then be able to recommend where to place the product in that emotional space.  This should make the customer feel the product is the best choice.  The researcher can identify which aspects to highlight or strengthen (positive thoughts or feelings that would make it seem more like the ideal) and which to downplay (any negative thoughts or areas where the competition is stronger).  This information can then be used to make recommendations about imagery, colours, taglines, slogans and other copy to create the optimal emotional tone to be used in communication of the product/brand.

Finally, by identifying the emotional positioning for the product/brand it is then possible to guide the client on how to implement the rational positioning.  The combination of understanding the tone and words to use (emotional) and how to tell the brand's story (rational) will provide the brand with non-rational associations that enhance the positioning by creating a feeling that the product is just what the customer wanted.

Conclusion

Rational positioning conducted in isolation will probably not allow your customer to engage emotionally with your brand and there is strong evidence to suggest that iconic brands all possess a strong emotional hold on their customers.